About Me

Known principally for his weekly political columns and his commentaries on radio and television, Chris Trotter has spent most of his adult life either engaging in or writing about politics. He was the founding editor of The New Zealand Political Review (1992-2005) and in 2007 authored No Left Turn, a political history of New Zealand. Living in Auckland with his wife and daughter, Chris describes himself as an “Old New Zealander” – i.e. someone who remembers what the country was like before Rogernomics. He has created this blog as an archive for his published work and an outlet for his more elegiac musings. It takes its name from Bowalley Road, which runs past the North Otago farm where he spent the first nine years of his life. Enjoy.

Bowalley Road Rules

The blogosphere tends to be a very noisy, and all-too-often a very abusive, place. I intend Bowalley Road to be a much quieter, and certainly a more respectful, place.So, if you wish your comments to survive the moderation process, you will have to follow the Bowalley Road Rules.These are based on two very simple principles:Courtesy and Respect.Comments which are defamatory, vituperative, snide or hurtful will be removed, and the commentators responsible permanently banned.Anonymous comments will not be published. Real names are preferred. If this is not possible, however, commentators are asked to use a consistent pseudonym.Comments which are thoughtful, witty, creative and stimulating will be most welcome, becoming a permanent part of the Bowalley Road discourse.However, I do add this warning. If the blog seems in danger of being over-run by the usual far-Right suspects, I reserve the right to simply disable the Comments function, and will keep it that way until the perpetrators find somewhere more appropriate to vent their collective spleen.

Followers

Friday, 29 June 2012

Don't Let Them Eat Cake: After reading Fran O'Sullivan's summary of fashion designer, Annah Stretton's, thinking on New Zealand's social policies, I sincerely hope that she never becomes Prime Minister - not even for a day.

WHAT WAS FRAN O’SULLIVAN THINKING when she devoted her Weekend Herald column to the political
thoughts of “fashion maven” Annah Stretton? Did she honestly believe she was
doing the woman a favour by publicising her controversial opinions? Did Ms
O’Sullivan really believe New Zealanders would be better off if the sharp-edged
social policies promoted by this designer of expensive ladies’ frocks were given
practical effect?

Personally, I was more disposed to believe that the veteran
journalist had inwardly been so appalled by Ms Stretton’s comments that she
decided to share them with an audience much larger than the Ernst &
Young-sponsored “Dress For Success” event at which they were delivered.

“Oh, Christopher, you’re so naïve”, came the immediate
response from a (now former) wearer of Stretton’s creations. “In the circles
Fran O’Sullivan moves in nobody regards Stretton’s ideas as in any way
odious or vicious. On the contrary, most of Fran’s friends probably subscribe
wholeheartedly to Annah Stretton’s views.”

I thought about this for a moment and realised, with a
sinking feeling, that she was right. You don’t have to look very long or listen
very hard to discover Ms Stretton’s catch-phrases: “culture of entitlement”;
“family unit of care”; the “absurdity” of universal, un-means-tested,
superannuation; tripping merrily off the tongues of “successful” business-women
all over New Zealand – especially in the provinces.

These ideas have been repeated so often by the solid
citizens of Tauranga, Napier, Ashburton and, of course, in Ms Stretton’s home
town of Morrinsville, that they’ve become a sort of right-wing catechism – something
to be recited at the drop of a designer hat (or an Ernst & Young
invitation). In such sealed social environments these proud adherents to the
conservative faith will seldom, if ever, hear anything to contradict their
prejudices.

Ms Stretton is fêted in the fashion magazines for her
charity work. For example, the “Dress for Success” organisation, at whose
fundraiser she was speaking, aims to help disadvantaged women back into the
workforce by clothing them in “professional attire”. As if the solution to
structural unemployment involved nothing more than offering these unfortunate
proletarian frumps a good zooshing-up. While handing out their second-hand frocks
and fashion tips, I wonder if Ms Stretton and her colleagues ever take a moment
to listen to the young women they’re dressing-up. It would be nice to think
that, just occasionally, social reality took a stroll down the catwalk.

Sadly, the maven’s manifesto suggests that, amongst all that
frilly condescension, reality failed to secure a back-stage pass. To argue that the DPB
should be capped at two children; that there be no automatic entitlement to
National Super; that ACC should be privatised; and that no one under the age of
20 should be able to collect an unemployment benefit (sorry, “Job Seekers
Allowance”); is to identify oneself as
someone without the faintest conception of what the consequences of such
policies might look like.

The kindest excuse is that in promoting such hard-line measures,
Ms Stretton was simply disbursing the ideological currency of her class. Readily
exchangeable in provincial towns like Morrinsville and throughout our leafier city
suburbs, but worthless on the mean streets of Otara and St Kilda.

Or, perhaps, I am once again displaying my naivety? Maybe Ms
Stretton, Ms O’Sullivan, and their ilk know only too well what the effects of
their “PM for a Day” prescriptions would be on those required to swallow them.

Of course there must
be pain. How can these people be expected to learn if it doesn’t hurt? Tough
love is what they need – not bleeding hearts!

Such is the language of social inequality: the merciless diction
of those who have mastered the obscene stage directions of Neoliberalism’s
theatre of cruelty.

The Weekend Herald
is to be congratulated for publishing this snap-shot of the successful business
entrepreneur’s world view. Now we know how the 1 percent think of, and speak
about, the 99 percent of New Zealanders who could never afford (and after Ms
O’Sullivan’s extraordinary column, probably shouldn’t be found dead wearing) an
Annah Stretton creation.

Representative Of The People: Egypt's new President, Mohammed Morsi, candidate of the Muslim Brotherhood, has been hailed as that country's first democratically elected leader. But early Islamic history manifested a strong impetus towards political representation and equality within the community of the faithful. The great hope of the so-called "Arab Spring" is that these traditions will undergo a powerful revival.

IS MOHAMMED MORSI Egypt’s first democratically elected
leader? Though many journalists are insisting he merits that distinction, it’s
just possible the journalists may be wrong.

Among the first peoples to be conquered by the followers of
the Prophet Mohammed, Seventh Century Egyptians discovered earlier than most
that membership of the community of the faithful (the Ummah) conferred radical new rights. Among the most important of
these was the right to elect representatives. These upright citizens (the Shura) were, in their turn, collectively
charged with determining upon whose shoulders the responsibility for leading
the peoples of Islam should fall.

The chosen one, known as the Caliph, was of necessity both a religious and political leader.
Islam, unlike Christianity, draws no clear distinction between the things that
belong to Caesar and the things that belongs to God. The Caliphate, at least in
its original form, was, therefore, a proto-democratic republic of faith, ruled
over by a person in whose supreme office the powers of President and Pope were
combined. It’s at least arguable that, fourteen hundred years ago, Mr Morsi had
a predecessor.

Given the political traditions of the era, it is hardly
surprising that the Caliphate became the prize of a succession of dynasties.
Even so, the core religious-political principle of the fundamental equality of
all believers made possible the dazzling and extraordinarily tolerant culture
of Islam’s “Golden Age” (750-1250 AD).

The Great Mosque of Cordoba, in Spain. In the islamic Golden Age (750-1250 AD) the best scientific minds were to be found in Egypt, Syria and Iraq.

Weakened by successive Christian assaults from the West (the
Crusades) the Abbasid Caliphate was finally laid low in 1258 by the Mongol
armies of Genghis Khan. The West, however, had reason to be grateful that
before the beautiful cities, towering mosques and celebrated universities were
destroyed, most of the scientific, mathematical, medical and philosophical
achievements of Islamic civilisation had already, by fair means and foul,
passed into the hands of Christendom.

Though the Caliphate would rise again under the Ottoman
Turks, it would never again attain the extraordinary confidence and poise of
Islam’s golden age. Hugely impressive (not to mention militarily dominant)
though the Ottoman Caliphate may have been, there was something missing. That
vital spark which had lit the fires of creation and inquiry for so long was,
for some reason, no longer being struck.

Scholars of Islamic history called that missing spark ijtihad – thespirit of independent reasoning. Today, we’d call it critical
thinking. The loss of confidence which followed the slaughter and devastation
of the Mongols, combined with the authoritarian military-bureaucratic culture
of the Ottomans, saw ijtihad replaced
by taqlid – reliance on the tested,
following established practice, deferring to the teachings of those who had
come before.

At the same moment that the knowledge passed to Christendom
began fostering the intellectual forces that would result in the Renaissance,
the Reformation and the Enlightenment, the Islamic world was beginning its slow
but remorseless decline into insularity and orthodoxy.

The real question to be asked about the so-called “Arab
Spring” is whether or not it signals a reaffirmation of the fundamental
equality of all believers, and a rebirth of the democratic spirit of the shura? If so, then the world can hope
that the spirit of independent thought, of ijtihad,
will similarly be born again and the Islamic world will recapture the glories
of its golden age.

But, if the revolts taking place across the Middle East end
up being hijacked by the upholders of taqlid:
if Mr Morsi and his Muslim Brotherhood are only interested in the
re-establishment of orthodoxy and the extinguishing of freedom, then spring
will become winter and the Ummah
will, once again, be robbed of the summer they deserve.

As we watch these events unfold across the Islamic world, we
should resist the temptation to celebrate our historical escape from the clutches
of taqlid. The global financial
crisis harrowing the West may not mirror the mayhem of the Mongols, but all
around us there is evidence of a very similar loss of confidence and
intellectual agility.

Looking at our own caliphs,
are we struck by their ability to engage in independent reasoning and creative
thinking? Or have they, too, fallen victim to the false promises of orthodoxy?

What now lies before the West: a golden light, or gathering
darkness? In the words of the Fifteenth Century Syrian scholar, Ahmad ibn
Arabshah: “If the future is hidden, yet you should guess it from the past.”

This essay was
originally published in The Otago Daily Times, The Waikato Times, The
Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru
Herald and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 29 June 2012.

Tuesday, 26 June 2012

Fingers Not yet Burnt: Only when the global environmental crisis is perceived as a direct existential threat will humanity take the steps necessary to address it. By then, of course, it will be too late.

WHO NOW REMEMBERS the 1992 “Earth Summit” meeting in Rio? Am
I right in recalling that Al Gore was present? And weren’t we represented by
the National Party’s smartest-ever cabinet minister – Simon Upton? It was all
very worthy, not to mention predictable: the rain forests were disappearing;
indigenous peoples were threatened; more and more species were endangered. And,
as if that wasn’t enough, the Summit’s “Climate Change Convention” warned
humanity that fossil-fuel emissions were heating up the Earth’s atmosphere.

All very important and urgent, but New Zealanders had other
things on their minds back then. The effects of Ruth Richardson’s “Mother of
All Budgets” and Jenny Shipley’s benefit cuts were all around them, and unemployment
was only slowly coming off its 11 percent peak. For a great many people the
survival of the planet came a poor second to the survival of themselves and
their families.

Twenty years on and another Rio Summit is warning us that
the condition of the planet’s wafer-thin biosphere, humanity’s incredibly
delicate survival-suit, is deteriorating rapidly. And, again, the effects of a
global economic crisis are dominating the headlines, banishing important
environmental stories to the inside pages of our daily newspapers.

Do we care that global temperatures continue their
relentless upward swing? Do we lament the extinction of entire species? Do we
understand the dangers of out-of-control deforestation in the planet’s tropical
zones? Of course we do. It’s just that we care about holding onto our jobs,
paying our bills and looking after our kids a whole lot more.

As a species we are genetically programmed to recognise and
repel immediate existential threats. The leopard in the long grass of the
savannah; the firestorm swallowing up the forest; the cave bear rearing out of
the darkness: these we can deal with. But the slow encroachment of the desert
sands; the gradual decline in the river’s flow; the changing migration paths of
woolly mammoths or caribou: these things proved more perplexing.

In the days before men drew lines on maps, people simply
moved on to where the grass was greener, the rivers flowed more swiftly and the
herds could be tracked and attacked in the same old ways. But today, one hundred
millennia removed from our hunter-gatherer past, the human species numbers
seven-thousand-millions, and moving on is not an option.

We must fight for our survival from where we are – and for
most of us that means fighting in a city. It was only a few years ago that more
than half of humanity ceased living in the countryside. If the planet is to be
saved, it will be by people living in its urban environment.

The 2,400 representatives from Non-Governmental
Organisations who attended the 1992 Rio Summit understood this very well. China
and India were industrialising at break-neck speed and simply could not avoid
drawing millions into the urban environments that manufacturing on a massive
scale inevitably creates. They urged the developing countries’ governments to
avoid the resource-depleting, pollution-generating automobile cultures of the
West by prioritizing the provision of public transportation. Anyone attempting
to navigate the streets of New Delhi or Shanghai will grasp how emphatically
the world’s fastest-growing economies declined to heed their advice.

The determination of these economies to afford their
consumers a Western life-style is entirely understandable, but it is also
strip-mining Australia, Africa and South America of their natural resources,
and sucking dry the world’s dwindling oil reserves. Unless the urban
environment undergoes changes as dramatic as those which set this global
environmental crisis in motion, its insatiable appetite, not only for minerals
and fossil fuels, but simply for food and water, will crash the entire system
of industrial civilisation.

The political representatives of late industrial capitalism
seem incapable of understanding these existential threats. The only bears
they’re willing to fight are those currently stalking Wall Street. It is to the
representatives of enlightened humanity that we must, therefore, turn if the
enemies of our common future are to be overcome: the Greens and those
social-democratic parties still capable of stepping-up to the challenges of
radical change.

Given New Zealand’s remoteness, and its relatively tiny
population, the contribution we can make to saving the world will, necessarily,
be limited. Perhaps the best gift we could offer our fellow human-beings is a
positive example of the practical changes that need to be made.

The devastated city of Christchurch could play a vital role
in this regard by modelling the sustainable urban environment the world needs
to copy. There’d be a state-of-the-art public transportation system; ecologically
intelligent architecture; urban gardens, self-sufficient small-scale energy
generators connected to the national grid; water recycling schemes; and the
conscious creation of resilient urban communities. (Hat-tip to Leanne Dalziel.)

The oft-quoted environmental slogan: “Think globally, act
locally” could hardly be more relevant.

Let the future begin right here.

This essay was
originally published in The Press of
Tuesday, 26 June 2012.

Monday, 25 June 2012

Members For The Distribution Workers Federation: By 1986, Trade unionists Larry Sutherland, Sonja Davies and Graham Kelly were moving steadily towards their parliamentary objectives. Observing their progress, the author, like so many Labour activists before him, posed the question: Why not me? The answer, as always, turned on exactly how much of his integrity he was prepared to sacrifice.

It was supposed to be a book about the birth of the
NewLabour Party, but somewhere along the way it became the story of what led me
into, and out of, the old Labour Party. In hopes of providing future political
studies students with a glimpse of what it was like to be a left-wing Labour
activist in the days of David Lange and Roger Douglas, I am publishing The Journey on Bowalley Road as a series of occasional postings. L.P. Hartley
wrote: “The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there.” May
these memoirs, written in 1989, serve, however poorly, as my personal passport.

Tuesday, 16 September 1986

ST PATRICK’S HALL is filling up with members of the Timaru
Labour Party. I stand nervously at the entrance, trying to recognise the faces
of those I have canvassed for support. Noelene Hanifin, Mike’s mother, is still
locked up with the Timaru Labour Electorate Committee (LEC). Mike, Francesca
and I cast worried glances at the door separating us from the meeting. We are
all hoping that Alan Aldridge, the LEC Chairperson, will be able to head-off
the supporters of the Timaru Labour Establishment and its redoubtable leader, Oliver
Gavigan.

Timaru, long a Labour stronghold, fell to the National Party
in the 1985 by-election. The meeting in St Patrick’s Hall has been called to
select the Party’s candidate for the 1987 General Election. I have decided to
seek the nomination.

My three-piece suit and trim haircut belie the feelings of
hostility I now harbour towards the Government that I am, quite
unrealistically, attempting to join. It was not always so.

* * * * *

SINCE THE BEGINNING of the year, a new expression has crept
into Labour party conversation: “constructive engagement”. It began as a Sean
Fleigner witticism. Constructive Engagement was the term coined by the Reagan
Administration to describe the United States’ relationship with the South
African apartheid regime. Sean drew the analogy with Fran Wilde’s insistence
that the left-wing of Labour’s caucus must seek to work with the cabinet and
attempt to guide them towards a more acceptable set of policies. I have used
the expression in my contributions to the National
Business Review. Now it has become respectable.

Other influences have been at work throughout 1986. Stan
Rodger’s Labour relations Bill is in the process of being drafted and nervous
trade unionists are working frantically behind the scenes to ensure that their
traditional rights are not legislated out of existence.

Rob Campbell has floated the concept of an Australian-style
“Accord” between the FOL and the Government.

Throughout the country, left-wing activists have been
pouring their energies into local body elections. In Wellington and Dunedin
(the most vociferous centres of anti-Government agitation) impressive gains
will be made by the Labour Party in terms of representation on their city
councils.

Everywhere, the energy and intensity of 1985 has been
channelled into “constructive” party work. And at the controls of the machine
sits Margaret Wilson and her coterie. The influence she exercises, by virtue of
her impeccable credentials with the Women’s and Affiliates’ Councils (the two
most influential bodies within the party) is impressive.

The secret of her
success rests upon a chameleon-like gift for blending into her environment. In
front of the Women’s Council she is the very image of a 1980s socialist
feminist. Speaking to the Affiliates’, she takes on the guise of a concerned
lecturer in industrial law, wrestling with the awesome difficulties of the Labour
Relations Bill. At the regional conferences Margaret is full of encouragement.
At Annual Conference, the stern guardian of the Government’s ratings. Wilson
controls the party in a way Anderton never did. The party is hers and she is
the Government’s greatest asset. Colin James, Editor of the National Business Review, will dub her
“Politician of the Year”.

* * * * *

I HAVE EXPERIENCED her skill at close quarters. As an
office-holder in Campbell’s Distribution Workers’ Federation, I have observed
the manoeuvrings of Graham Kelly, Sonja Davies and Larry Sutherland (all of
whom have close connections with the DWF) as they moved steadily towards their
parliamentary objectives. Why not Chris Trotter MP? It is the lure that traps the
most determined of dissidents. That siren-song of power. In the office of Tony
Timms, the party’s general secretary, Margaret Wilson sizes me up:

“Those Timaru bastards are all mad.” Timms leans forward
across the desk. “They write to me at least once a week! We have to have a
decent candidate.”

To those reaching towards the sunlight of political office,
such talk is the purest of all fertilisers. On the Third Floor of Fraser House,
in the heart of the nation’s capital, I am already beginning to succumb; pretty
speeches about the compatibility of Rogernomics and social-democracy trip off
my tongue. Timms and Wilson beam encouragement: candidates for selection have
little to gain by writing embarrassing anti-government articles for the National Business Review.

* * * * *

NOW I HADa selection meeting to address. There was no
earthly chance of me winning: in the end I simply could not stick to the
script. One foray into the Timaru electorate, one evening of reciting the party
line, had been enough. My friends looked at me askance; was this really Chris
Trotter talking earnestly about the need for “realism”, about inflation
“tracking down”? Francesca hardly recognised me. I hardly recognised myself.

A new script would have to be written. On August 25 a letter was distributed to 500 party members throughout the Timaru
electorate. In the letter I accused the Labour caucus of “riding roughshod
over practically every principle the Labour Party stands for.” A surprising
number of Timaru people had welcomed this broadside from the Dunedin
“democratic socialist”; the local party faithful, however, were appalled.

The outrage was not restricted to Timaru. News of my attack
upon the Government had been carried in all the metropolitan newspapers. Labour
MPs in marginal seats were furious. I was to confront some of them at the
annual conference, held in Wellington between 29 Augustand 1 September 1986.

* * * * *

THE AFFILIATES’ COUNCIL met prior to the conference. Peter
Cullen, secretary of the Wellington Hotel and Hospital Workers’ Union, drew me
aside.

“Look Chris,” he said, “we’ve put you down as our third
preference for Industrial Rep’. When our delegates read that bilge you wrote in
the candidate’s biographies they just about threw up. We weren’t going to vote
for you at all until we read about that letter you sent out in Timaru.”

“No worries, Peter,” I reassured him, “I didn’t deserve any
better for that shit. I’m just glad I came to my senses in time.”

“If Rick barker makes it on to the Exec, our votes will go
to you. If he doesn’t, it’ll be him and Kelly.”

It’s a tricky situation. Campbell has sanctioned my
nomination for Industrial Representative on the New Zealand Council of the
party in an attempt to block the election of Pat Kelly. (Campbell and Kelly
have been at daggers drawn since the partial privatisation of the Bank of New
Zealand, a move Campbell facilitated.)In my “candidate days” I had looked like a safe bet, but now, unbeknown
to Campbell, and in response to his conversion to Rogernomics, I have switched
my allegiance to his arch-rival.

The decision is not difficult to make. I seek out Rick Barker
(National Secretary of the Hotel and Hospital Workers Union) and convey to
him my determination to withdraw in his favour if he fails in his bid for the
Executive. By doing this I hope to swing my votes in Kelly’s direction.

* * * * *

THE WELLINGTON Hotel and Hospital Workers Union hall in
Marion Street is overflowing with what the news media are describing as “The
Broad Left’. I am a little sceptical. It seems that half the delegates to
conference are packed into this great cavern of a room in the heart of
Wellington’s red-light district. And from the ministerial LTDs parked outside,
one must draw the conclusion that the “Broad Left” is a very loose definition
indeed.

Peter Cullen chairs the meeting, flanked by Jim Anderton
andPat Kelly. We are witnessing the
birth of the Economic Policy Network – a loose coalition of Labour Party
dissidents, trade unionists and left-wing economists. The atmosphere is
boisterous and good-humoured. Even on the Left, it seems, the energy is now
controlled and “constructively engaged”. The next general election is just
twelve months away and the entire party is carefully tidying away the debris of
past conflicts. The conference slogan: “The Future is Ours”, is obviously being
interpreted in different ways.

Rob Campbell glowers darkly over the proceedings, keeping
his own counsel. There will be precious few votes for him from the Left this
year, his lobbying campaign will focus on the Centre and Right of Conference. A
little further down the hall stands Phil Goff. Perhaps he is recalling the days
when he, too, called himself a socialist?

The PSA’s economist, Peter Harris, launches into a lengthy
lecture on the failings of the Government’s economic policies. The speeches
that follow are passionate but unfocused. I find it difficult to concentrate.
Someone asks me to sing The Red Flag.
The audience struggles through the chorus, but the verses I sing alone. The
“Broad Left” has yet to learn the words.

* * * * *

BARKER’S BID falls just short of victory. The rumour mills
of the Women’s Council have done their work well and Ruth Dyson pips him at the
post. I am waiting in the queue of speakers at the front of the auditorium.
Barker is just behind me. “You made a deal – now stick to it!” I tell myself.

I move across the stage to Tony Timms and inform him of my
withdrawal. Wilson, seated next to him, swivels round in her chair and glares
at me.

“Don’t tell me, tell the returning officer!” Timms snaps
back.

“Why?” Is all Wilson allows herself by way of comment.

Burly Geoff Braybrooke, is clearly enjoying the drama. As he
announces my withdrawal, all hell breaks loose among the delegates from the
Distribution Workers’ Federation.

“Point of Order! Point of Order!” Larry Sutherland cannot
believe what he has heard. “Chris Trotter is standing for Industrial Rep!”

Francesca, feigning innocence, waves airily in the direction
of the exit. Campbell, dressed like a street-fighter in leather jacket and
jeans, lopes off in pursuit. Down at the front of the hall, resuming my place
in the queue, I breathe a large sigh of relief.

Kelly wins the election for Industrial rep by a mere 16
votes. Campbell is livid.

* * * * *

IT IS the Labour Party’s seventieth anniversary. The social
in the old Wellington Town Hall that evening is a celebration of the party’s
longevity. The events of the day are beginning to take their toll. Sick at
heart, I survey the revellers. Just what is the Labour Party in 1986? Certainly
not the party that was formed in 1916. I feel estranged, forsaken, alone. My
own union is barely speaking to me. Pat Kelly is strangely aloof. Annette King,
MP for Horowhenua, bails me up and lambasts me for the Timaru letter. A deep
sense of loathing congeals in the pit of my stomach. “At the Timaru selection”,
I tell myself, “I will tell the truth about this party.”

* * * * *

MINE WAS THE second-to-last speech of the evening: “Tonight,”
I begin, “we will talk of what Labour was, and of what Labour has become. It is
a tale of two cities: it is the story of Jerusalem, the City of Hope; and of Babylon,
the City of despair.”

All nervousness falls away as I lift up the banner of
dissent once more. I have passed the test, will remain myself: “I shall not
cease from mental fight, nor shall my sword sleep in my hand, till we have
built Jerusalem … in New Zealand’s
green and pleasant land.”

THERE’S NOTHING NEW about Welfare Reform, it’s as old as the
ideas advanced in its justification. Managing the poor and vulnerable is just
one of those perennial problems with which governments of every stripe have to
contend.

Mostly, politicians restrict themselves to tinkering, but
every so often a government comes along which engages in the sort of ruthless,
root-and-branch reform that leaves deep scars upon the body politic.
Fortunately, the bitter historical memories handed down by its victims serve as
a prophylactic against similar “reforms” for generations. But, eventually,
popular memory fades, and when it does the threat of root-and-branch reform
returns. And tragedy follows it.

New Zealand may soon be facing just such a threat and,
curiously, it’s as likely to come from the Left as the Right. If that sounds
improbable, then perhaps we should all remind ourselves that it was the
supposedly left-leaning Labour Party which unleashed the “New Right” economic
reforms of the late-1980s. And that it was no less a “liberal” than Bill
Clinton who campaigned on a promise to “end welfare as we have come to know it”
and who, in 1996, affixed his Presidential signature to the Personal
Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act.

President Bill Clinton signs the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, putting an end to "welfare as we have come to know it", August 22 1996.

But why would Labour do such a thing? How could attacking
the poor and vulnerable possibly assist its reclamation of the Treasury
benches?

Part of the answer lies in the “communitarian” beliefs
evinced by followers of Labour’s “Third Way”. It’s a philosophy which asserts
that too much emphasis has been placed on “rights” and not enough on
“responsibilities” in the formulation of public policy. Society, they say, has
a duty to see that one group of citizens’ rights are not upheld at their
neighbours’ expense.

The implications of communitarianism for solo mums, the
unemployed, the sick and the disabled are readily imagined. Indeed, they’d do
well to remember that David Parker, Labour’s finance spokesperson, is a strong
believer in communitarian principles.

The other reason Labour might opt for root-and-branch
welfare reform involves the same reasoning that went into the National Party’s
own root-and-branch solutions to the “problem” of “welfare dependency”: poor
people don’t vote. Eight hundred thousand New Zealanders failed to cast a vote
in the last election. Most of them were young, many of them were poor, and
practically all of them didn’t give a stuff about politics.

Motivating such voters requires immense effort, and
National has opted instead
to appease its more conservative supporters by transforming the young
and the poor (Maori and Pasifika especially) into handy targets.

Labour’s challenge is to find some way of mobilising the
young without at the same time making itself a political hostage to the needs
of the poor. One of the easier ways to do this might be to provide younger
voters with a hate figure: a stereotype capable of igniting both their
indignation and their fear. Fortunately for Labour, such a stereotype already
exists: the Selfish Baby Boomer.

By encouraging Generations X and Y to blame the Baby Boomers
for everything from the price of real estate to the rising cost of tertiary
education, and enlisting their support for a “root-and-branch” reform of New
Zealand’s “irresponsibly generous and fiscally unsustainable” system of
universal superannuation, Labour could off-set its declining levels of support
among older voters. By attributing New Zealand’s indebtedness to the
“intergenerational theft” of Baby Boomers, this stripped-down, communitarian
Labour Party could, at least in younger voters’ minds, transform “austerity”
from a political swear-word into a righteous electoral virtue. In combination
with the Greens’ bracing mantra of ecological restraint, they could be on to a
winner.

In 1834 the newly enfranchised English middle-class
shrugged-off its responsibilities to the poor and vulnerable by passing a new
Poor Law. Its hated symbol, the workhouse, was immortalised by Charles Dickens in Oliver Twist. The new Poor Law’s sponsor
was not some Tory reactionary, but the liberal Whig, Lord Melbourne.

The Workhouse: The New Poor Law of 1834 brought these dreaded institutions into existence. They were explicitly required to offer conditions harsh enough to dissuade all but the most desperate (overwhelmingly, as the above photograph reveals, the elderly) from seeking sustenance within their walls. The legislation was the work not of Tory reactionaries, but of liberal Whigs.

Baby Boomers, be on your guard.

This essay was
originally published in The Dominion Post, The Otago Daily Times, The
Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily
News, The Timaru Herald and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 22 June 2012.

Tuesday, 19 June 2012

Tout le Monde? - C'est Moi! At the core of the current "debate" about the sustainability of NZ Superannuation are the same forces that have dismantled so much of the welfare state already: the forces of domestic and global finance. All the more curious, therefore, that Labour should be lining up behind them.

MY DAUGHTER AND I were driving back from the mall Saturday
afternoon, listening to the news on the car radio. “Everyone” was saying that
New Zealand’s superannuation scheme was in trouble. “Everyone” was similarly in
agreement that the retirement age would have to be raised from 65 to 67 years.
“Everyone” was also absolutely convinced that if this didn’t happen soon the
whole scheme would become unsustainable.

I remember saying to my daughter: “Whenever you hear a news
bulletin like that you should always ask yourself who this ‘Everyone’ is.”

“Everyone” certainly does not include a clear majority of
New Zealand’s political parties.

The governing party, National, is resolutely opposed to
making any changes at all to New Zealand Superannuation. NZ First is equally
adamant that there should be no change – unless it involves lifting the
percentage of the net average wage paid to superannuitants from 66 to 68
percent. The Green Party, likewise, opposes changing the scheme. Ditto for Mana
and the Maori Party. (Indeed, given Maori New Zealanders’ lower life expectancy,
they believe the eligibility-age should be lowered – not lifted!) United Future
also supports keeping the age at 65, but proposes that citizens be encouraged
to remain in the workforce a little longer, and uplift their super’ later at a
higher rate. Or, retire earlier, but at a lower rate.

The only major party currently advocating increasing the age
of eligibility (from 65 to 67) is the Labour Party. In this they are supported
(albeit very quietly) by the tiny, far-right, Act Party.

Labour justifies its position by pointing out that in just a
few years New Zealand will be spending as much on superannuation as it does on
education. What a curious argument. Why would a social-democratic party be
suggesting that the state should spend less on its older citizens than it does
on the young? We can only hope that Labour’s strategists are not planning to
turn the younger voters of Generations X and Y against the “selfish” Baby
Boomers. David Shearer hasn’t quite accused this latter group of
“intergenerational theft” – but that’s the electoral logic of his position.

Having established that “Everyone” doesnot include most of
the country’s politicians, let’s take a look at who it does include. Perhaps the most significant member of the “Everyone”
group is the Retirement Commissioner, Diana Crossan. Charged with providing the
Government with “independent” advice on retirement issues, the Commissioner’s
views should, on the face of it, be accorded considerable weight.

The only problem with being guided by the Retirement
Commissioner is that her views on this crucial matter are starkly contradicted
by a significant number of economists – including those working for the OECD.
As these economists indicated in their recent survey of international
retirement policies, New Zealand’s superannuation scheme compares extremely
favourably with all those operating in the 34 “First World” countries it covers.

Right now, in 2012, our scheme absorbs less than 5 percent
of New Zealand’s GDP – that’s about half the amount spent by the other OECD
countries. Yes, it is going to rise as the “Baby Boom” generation reaches
retirement age, but only to the percentage of GDP most wealthy countries are
paying right now. New Zealanders should be very proud of their scheme, which is
not only extremely cost effective, but also ensures that all our elder citizens are entitled to a level of income security unsurpassed
anywhere else in the world.

So why is our Retirement Commissioner crying “Wolf!” on the
cost and sustainability of the New Zealand scheme? Perhaps Ms Crossan’s views
have been influenced by her former employer – the financial institution which started
out as the Australian Mutual Provident Society – now known as AMP. This massive
financial institution merged last year with AXA Asia and Pacific Holdings, and
just under half its shares are held by HSBC, JP Morgan and Citigroup.

And that’s the scary thing. When you dig into the people and
institutions making up “Everyone”, you discover that just about all of them, in
one way or another, are bound up with vast financial corporations, all
possessing a powerful vested interest in wrenching the provision of citizens’
basic retirement income out of the hands of the state and into their own, private,
talons.

As is so often the case, these vast corporate bodies,
working through their highly skilled and fearsomely resourced PR organisations,
have contrived to create an apparently genuine consensus that change is both
necessary and inevitable. So successful have they been that, in a recent
TV3-Reid Research poll, nearly two-thirds of New Zealanders dutifully
regurgitated the opinion, force-fed to them by the finance industry, that the
eligibility-age for National Super should rise from 65 to 67.

“Everyone” does not believe superannuation is unsustainable,
but repeat the lie often enough and everybody just might think it’s true.

This essay was
originally published in The Press of
Tuesday, 19 June 2012.

Friday, 15 June 2012

High Flyers? Students belonging to Generations X and Y accuse the Baby Boom generation of committing "intergenerational theft", but, as Jill Ovens points out in this guest posting, these students might benefit from a course in New Zealand's recent social history. For many of their parents, particularly those born into the working class, life in the 1970s and 80s was not as easy as they're being encouraged to believe.

THERE IS A LOT of idealised commentary on what it was like
to be a university student in the 1970s compared with the lot of today’s
students. This is leading young affluent university students to accuse “baby
boomers” of stealing from the next generation.

It is a concept of affluent students because the kids of
working-class parents don’t generally get to university. Those few who do make
it know how much their parents struggled, working two or three jobs, night and
day, to get them through school.

Working-class kids didn’t get to university in the 1970s
either, unless they had a scholarship. University Entrance paid 9/10 of your
fees, but that still meant a bill of $90.00 (the equivalent of two-and-a-half week's pay, or more than $1,000 in
today’s terms). There were student allowances in the form of bursaries, but if
your parents lived in a university town, you couldn’t get a boarding allowance.

There were no fast food restaurants to provide jobs
throughout the year, so you had to earn enough to live on during the varsity
holidays. That was okay for the guys as there were well paying jobs in the
freezing works and car factories. For women students, it was very different.

Equal pay didn’t come in till 1972. That meant that if we
did the same job, men and women were to be paid the same. But we weren’t given
the opportunities to do the same jobs. They didn’t let women into McKechnie
Brothers, the aluminium extrusion foundry where my boyfriend worked in the
holidays (except in the canteen).

I packed peanuts at Eta Foods, screwed lids on Vick’s jars,
sorted indescribably filthy linen in Christchurch Hospital laundry, and I
earned $15.00 a week cleaning people’s houses for Nurse Maud, a district
nursing association. But I could never earn enough to go flatting, so I spent
my whole varsity life living with my parents.

When we graduated, the opportunities were very limited. I
didn’t want to be a teacher, and the Bank of New Zealand said I’d make a good
teller because I was good at maths. I turned them down.

We got paid a lot less than our male friends, and despite
women’s liberation, there was a cultural expectation that we would soon produce
babies (at least three of them).

We bought houses in huge Neil Housing subdivisions way out
in Massey, Manuwera and Glenfield where there were no trees, no amenities
(certainly no gym!), and no public transport.

I washed the nappies in a wringer washing machine and hung
them on the clothes line. We ran an old VW between the two of us so I was stuck
at home. The couch was Mum and dad’s hand-me-down and the bed was bought at a
second-hand store.

There was no paid parental leave and limited childcare, so
we women graduates had a big gap in our careers that made it difficult to come
back into the job market. We had no superannuation as Muldoon scrapped the Kirk
scheme.

If we got divorced, as many of us did, any equity we had in
our house was divided up. And when our kids came out of high school in the
1990s, there were no jobs, so they stayed home for years, along with their girlfriends
and eventually their kids.

Because our kids can’t afford to buy houses, we bought
houses for them to live in using the equity from our house, and now all our
money is tied up in mortgages. At the same time, we’re supporting our parents
in their old age.

That’s how life is and always has been, for most of us. Our
parents worked to give us a decent start in life, and we worked hard so our
kids could have a fair go. We’re looking after our parents in their old age. We
hope we’ll be looked after in our old age.

The Arch-Heretic of Twentieth Century Economics: John Maynard Keynes was one of those rare heretics whose ideas worked so well in practice that they became (for thirty extraordinary years) the new orthodoxy. His radical economic thinking inspired everyone from Adolf Hitler to Mickey Savage.

IS IT POSSIBLE to be both a politician and a heretic? With
the times so out of joint it’s a question more and more voters around the world
are asking. Observing the peculiar unanimity with which the international
political class has responded to the global financial crisis, this voter
scepticism appears entirely justified. In only a handful of countries (the most
obvious being Greece) have politicians either voluntarily, or by the sheer
force of public opinion, promoted policies unsanctioned by the global guardians
of economic and political orthodoxy.

This was certainly not the case the last time the world was
mired in economic catastrophe. One of the most intriguing historical aspects of
the Great Depression of the 1930s is the willingness of contemporary political
leaders to challenge the economic orthodoxy of their day.

On the Right, in Germany, Hitler tackled his country’s
massive unemployment and stagnant industry by embarking on a programme of
comprehensive rearmament – what later came to be known as “militarised
Keynesianism”. On the Left, in the Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin’s “Five Year
Plans” mobilised the entire population behind a crash programme of
industrialisation. Somewhere between these two extremes, Franklin D.
Roosevelt’s “New Deal” put hundreds-of-thousands of Americans to work on bold
public infrastructure projects such as the Tennessee Valley Authority and the
Grand Coulee Dam.

Spend, FDR, Spend! The Grand Coulee Dam became one of the enduring symbols of the New Deal's massive investment in US infrastructure. When everyone else is broke, the state is both practically and morally obliged to stimulate the economy out of trouble.

What made these programmes so unorthodox was the way they
were paid for. Herr Doktor Hjalmar Schacht, Hitler’s Minister of Economics,
deployed his infamous “Mefo Bills” to pump-up the German arms industry. This
financial device was somewhat akin to our first Labour government’s use of
“Reserve Bank credit” to fund its state housing programme – only bigger. FDR
was similarly persuaded to pay for his public works schemes by sending the
United States’ budget into the red. By contrast, Stalin’s economic success was
based on the super-exploitation of his own unfortunate people – especially the
unpaid labour of the millions of political prisoners his secret police had
poured into the “gulags” (Soviet concentration camps).

While Stalin followed the brutal methods adopted by Western
capitalists in the early stages of the industrial revolution, and then
throughout the wretched territories of their sprawling colonial empires during
the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries (check out the history of the
“Belgian” Congo for the most gruesome example of pre-Soviet super-exploitation)
both Roosevelt and Hitler were inspired (either directly or indirectly) by the
thinking of the greatest economic heretic of the twentieth century, John
Maynard Keynes.

Defying his orthodox colleagues’ advocacy of austerity
measures to bring their respective governments’ books into balance, Keynes
argued that politicians must counter the “paradox of thrift” by borrowing and
spending their way back to prosperity: “For Government borrowing of one kind or another is nature’s remedy, so to speak,
for preventing business losses from being, in so severe a slump as the present
one, so great as to bring production altogether to a standstill.” His 1933
book, The Means to Prosperity, was
read with great enthusiasm by FDR’s “Brains Trust” of economic advisers. German
economists read it too.

So effective were
Keynes’ heretical ideas at relieving the misery of the Great Depression and
financing the Allies’ victory in World War II that, by 1946, they had become
the new economic orthodoxy. And, if
the proof of his theoretical pudding was in the eating, then the extraordinary
longevity of the post-war boom (1945-1975) provides ample evidence for the
efficacy of Lord Keynes’ economic recipes. Indeed, one could argue that the
concerted (and unfortunately successful) campaign by corporate capitalism’s
intellectual apologists to convince the world that the classical economists’
1930s critique of the Keynesian “heresy” was correct, lies at the root of all
our present evils.

It is tempting to
say that what the world needs is “another Keynes” to lead it out of its present
economic woes. But that would be wrong and foolish. Keynes’ ideas are there on
the bookshelves: just waiting for a politician with the will to use them. Our
world’s predicament lies precisely in the fact that its self-serving and
morally compromised political class is simply too gutless and too heartless to
risk the accusation of heresy.

As Keynes himself
observed, these peddlers of neo-classical orthodoxy “resemble Euclidean geometers in a non-Euclidean world who, discovering
that in experience straight lines apparently parallel often meet, rebuke the
lines for not keeping straight”.

This essay was
originally published in The Otago Daily Times, The Waikato Times, The
Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru
Herald and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 15 June 2012.

Wednesday, 13 June 2012

Farewell To The Working Class: Former Labour candidate, Josie Pagani, takes issue with Chris Trotter's Refugee Statusposting. He responds by arguing that her urge to rid Labour of "outdated, misplaced dogma" only proves her inability to distinguish the winning of an election from successfully making history.

POOR JOSIE PAGANI, it’s just so unfair that politics won’t
let her have her cake and eat it too. Apparently, it’s not enough to be told
that your hubby’s strategies are working, and that the outcome both you and he desire
most, a Labour victory in 2014, is looking more and more like a safe investment
on iPredict. No, Labour victories have to be made of more than mere spin and
gimmicks and tawdry compromises, they should come decked-out in all the finery
of “genuine social democracy that is radical precisely because it stands beside
working people who worry about their jobs and need more money in the weekly
wage packet to pay the bills.”

The sort of victory that Labour won in 1938 – with 55
percent of the popular vote – and all the banners bravely flying: that’s what
Josie wants. The pity of it is that everything Labour did back then, in the
1930s, to merit such a decisive electoral mandate involved the very policies
that Josie now dismisses as being fit only for a “romanticised” and “pretend”
Utopia.

What she wants are the sort of policies promoted by “successful,
history-making social democratic leader[s] the world over”. Stand-out
characters like Barack Obama (servant of Wall Street and master of the killer
drones) and Gerhard Schroeder (whose policy of making Germany’s exports
unfairly competitive, by suppressing German workers’ wage growth, lies at the
heart of the Eurozone’s present crisis). These are the sort of blokes Josie’s
looking for: social democrats who refuse to “indulge” the ideas of … um … social democrats.

Part of Josie’s problem is that she confuses “history-making”
with success at the polls. It was precisely this confusion that Refugee Status – the posting Josie so vehemently denounces on her Facebook page – attempts to address.

Far from sneering at the notion of Labour winning back its former
supporters by convincing them that Mr Shearer respects their values and admires
their commitment to hard work and personal betterment, I recognise it as a
potentially winning rhetorical gesture. What Josie doesn’t appear to understand,
however, is that the statement is also a direct steal from the rhetoric of our
political enemies; the sort of language you hear in the mouths of right-wing voters
who “despise working people” and “look down on their values”; those very same “creatures
from the barbecue pit and the sports bar” who brought down the government of
Helen Clark in 2008.

As the American political psychologist, George Lakoff, constantly reminds us: using the rhetoric of our political enemies only becomes truly effective
when we also embrace the values that their language expresses. That is the real
historical lesson to be drawn from the careers of nominally social-democratic
leaders like Tony Blair, Gerhard Schroeder and Barack Obama. Blair, in
particular, became prime minister of the United Kingdom not by repudiating Margaret
Thatcher’s neoliberal, militaristic and authoritarian legacy, but by convincing
the English middle-class that he was the only politician fit to inherit it.
Only when Labour had ditched “Clause 4” and every other shred of “outdated,
misplaced dogma”; only when Rupert Murdoch felt safe to let Blair’s party bask
in the radiant glow of The Sun; would
“New Labour” finally be permitted to come first past the winning post.

Let’s pause here for a short historical and psephological
lesson for Josie. The British Labour Party wasn’t rendered unelectable by
holding fast to its founding principles, it was kept out of office by the
deliberate defection of its right-wing MPs. The party they formed: called,
interestingly, the Social Democrat Party; was intended to (and did) exploit the
inherent unfairness of the FPP system to prevent Labour winning the 1983, 1987
and 1992 UK general elections. Throughout the 1980s, the British Conservative
Party never won more than 42.4 percent of the popular vote. Between them, the
Labour Party and the SDP-Liberal Alliance regularly won more than 50 percent.

Rupert's Reward: Neil Kinnock's expulsion of the Militant Tendency notwithstanding, "it was The Sun wot won it" in 1992.

So you see, Josie, it’s a very moot point as to whether it was
the Militant Tendency that kept Labour out of power in the 1980s, or the
right-wing MPs that Militant was lining-up for de-selection – the ones who led
the split. And, paradoxically, it was Josie’s hero, Neil Kinnock, who, by
expelling Militant, opened the doors to Blair’s “modernisers”. (Kinnock’s reward,
incidentally, was the infamous Sun
headline of 1992: “Will the last person to leave Britain please turn out the
lights.”)

It is also worth noting that the image of Labour that Josie
grew up with: one of endless internecine squabbling and general left-wing
lunacy; was a fiction carefully contrived and nurtured by the right-wing
tabloid press – the power and reach of which (not to mention its moral
delinquency) continues to be exposed at the Leveson Inquiry.

It is, perhaps, no accident that Josie’s take on Labour
politics should have been imbibed from headlines in the Murdoch press, or that
the fetid, the fatuous and the downright fake version of history and politics
promoted in the “mainstream” news media should shine through practically every
line of her Facebook posting. Josie is the sort of politician who, like the
Prime Minister, John Key, really does believe that “perception is reality”.

Reality, however, is made of sterner stuff. Which is why the
only social democrats who possess the slightest right to describe their time in
office as “successful’ or “history-making” are those who left the society they
presided over more equal, more free, better housed, better educated, in better
health and working for higher wages in a union shop.

Mr Shearer may win in 2014, Josie, but if, when he finally leaves
office, New Zealand is a less equal and a less free country, whose working people
are still living in damp and over-crowded houses, and which is still failing to
address the educational needs of Maori and Pasifika students, still making
people pay to see the doctor, and still allowing workers to be bullied into signing
individual employment agreements in non-unionised workplaces, then I ask again,
as I asked in the posting which so upset you:

Tuesday, 12 June 2012

Suck It Up, Minister: Education Minister, Hekia Parata, was forced to reverse her government's own policy on class sizes in the face of massive public opposition. Had she possessed sufficient critical intelligence to challenge the policy's prime promoter, Treasury Secretary, Gabriel Makhlouf, she could have saved herself - and her government - a very large serving of very dead rat.

IN THE END, it all comes back to Treasury. Education
Minister, Hekia Parata, like so many politicians before her, has taken the
advice of Treasury’s ideologues, and paid the price. This willingness of right-
and left-wing politicians to drag their careers over a cliff, by following the
lead of an agency which has consistently failed to tender either reliable or
useful advice to government, bears testimony to ideology’s uncanny knack for
over-riding the urgings of electoral common sense.

The debacle over class sizes may be traced back to
Treasury’s advice to the incoming Minister of Education following the 2011
General Election. Faced with an intensifying fiscal crisis, Treasury Secretary,
Gabriel Makhlouf, saw an opportunity to attend to Treasury’s unfinished
business with this country’s disconcertingly independent educationalists.

It thus constitutes a standing rebuke to Treasury’s
otherwise unassailable neoliberal mandarinate. Its collegial values and
altruistic purposes sit most uncomfortably within the neoliberals’ highly
individualistic and competitive reading of human nature. While achieving a
large measure of success in the universities (attributable mostly to New
Zealand academics’ timidity and lack of solidarity) Treasury’s neoliberal
policies have been staunchly and successfully resisted in New Zealand’s primary
and secondary schools. This is due, almost entirely, to the strength of New
Zealand’s two main teacher unions – the NZEI and the PPTA.

Before New Zealand’s teaching profession can finally be
“neoliberalised”, it will first be necessary to break these teacher unions.
There are two ways of doing this. The first, and most brutal, is to do what
Scott Walker, Governor of the US state of Wisconsin, did: pass legislation
stripping state employees of their right to collective bargaining. The second,
and much more effective, way to break a union is to undermine its members’
solidarity: to divide and conquer.

The classic method of decollectivising a workforce is the
introduction of performance pay. Once workers’ remuneration ceases to be
reckoned by the job to be done, and is set, instead, by the boss’s perception
of how well each individual worker is doing the job, the ability of the
workforce to maintain collective cohesion and purpose rapidly falls away.

New Zealand has, of course, already attempted a legislative
“final solution” to the union problem. But, although the Employment Contracts
Act (1991) proved highly successful at breaking the power of private sector
unions; public employees – especially teachers – by sticking together and
fighting back, have resisted every attempt to set one colleague against
another, undermine the union, and hand the education sector over to Treasury
(and its political handmaidens) for neoliberal “re-education”.

It is, therefore, very difficult not to read the Treasury
Secretary’s advocacy for trading-off a few extra pupils in every class-room for
a lift in the quality of the country’s teachers, as a way of admitting
performance pay (and undermining the teacher unions) by the back door.

Citing the highly contestable figure of “one in three”
school-leavers entering the New Zealand workforce as an educational failure, Mr
Makhlouf argued strongly, and very publicly, that this scandalous “output” of
the system could only be rectified by encouraging better teaching. By this he
did not mean that we should embrace the Finnish policy of keeping a very high
teacher-student ratio while, at the same time, ensuring that teaching remains
one of that country’s best qualified and well-paid professions. No, what Mr
Makhlouf wanted was an opportunity to pit teachers against one another in a
quest to find “the best” teachers, and then, presumably, offer them individual
employment contracts and higher pay. This competitive model would also have
identified “the worst” teachers, allowing them to be purged from the system.
School staff-rooms would thus become battle-grounds where “winners” prospered
and “losers” lost their jobs. Collegial values, ill-adapted to Treasury’s new
“survival of the fittest” environment, would be driven to extinction – followed
closely by the teacher unions.

The triumph of the competitive market model within the
teaching profession would, inevitably, see its operating principles installed
in every class-room. The transmission of skills and knowledge, the system’s
outputs, would be subjected to detailed empirical measurement. Every pupil
would be “tested”, and every school’s resourcing determined by the results of
those tests. New Zealand’s internationally admired education system would very
quickly join the derelict systems of the United States and the United Kingdom.

Was Ms Parata really seeking this disintegration of New
Zealand’s education system? Of course not! Why, then, couldn’t she decode Mr
Makhlouf’s policy prescription? The answer is simple: to decipher neoliberal
ideology one needs to adopt a critical perspective; and that presupposes
ideological agnosticism.

Had Ms Parata felt equal to challenging Treasury’s
ideologically-driven recommendations, she’d never have been required to undertake
her embarrassing political “reversal”.

This essay was
originally published in The Press of
Tuesday, 6 June 2012.

Monday, 11 June 2012

Safe Haven: David Shearer has a great deal of experience working with refugees. He knows that the last thing people fleeing from war and oppression want to encounter is divisive political ideology. Voters migrating from National to Labour are much the same - and Mr Shearer seems only too happy to oblige them by transformimng Labour into a "politics-free zone".

NATIONAL DROPS four percentage points in the latest 3
News/Reid Research poll and Labour picks up almost exactly the same amount.
What’s wrong with this picture?

Too small and too timid to go after the 800,000 New
Zealanders who did not bother to vote in the 2011 General Election, Labour’s
strategy for 2014 appears to involve transforming itself into a refugee camp
for disillusioned, disaffected, or just plain disgusted National Party voters.

David Shearer knows a great deal about refugee camps, he did,
after all, spend many years working for the United Nations. He knows, for
example, that if they’re to function properly refugee camps must steer well
clear of politics. All that people fleeing war zones and/or massive persecution
are looking for is a place of safety: somewhere they can find food, shelter and,
if they’re lucky, some semblance of human warmth and sympathy.

When former National Party voters abandon John Key’s
government for Mr Shearer’s opposition, the last thing they want, upon arrival,
is to be bombarded with radical left-wing propaganda. Ideologically-driven
policy-making is what they are fleeing. If they discover they’ve only exchanged
one bunch of gimlet-eyed apparatchiks for another, they’ll simply keep on
moving. Some will push-on to the Greens, some to NZ First, while others may
even travel as far as Colin Craig’s Conservative Party.

There is nothing homogeneous about this stream of refugees,
it contains many political tribes. Former Labour supporters – the ones who
abandoned the party in 2005 and 2008 – will be the easiest to assimilate. All Mr
Shearer has to tell them is that the party has rediscovered its respect and
admiration for their values - especially their commitment to hard work and personal
betterment. It’s an assurance that will serve equally well for the dwindling
tribe of National Party moderates. In Labour’s camp, Mr Shearer will tell them,
they’re in capable and experienced hands. Here, they’ll encounter no promises
to raise taxes or restore trade union rights. Here, their investments in the
partially-privatised state assets will remain perfectly secure. Here, they will
be safe.

And the Labour tribe itself – the people who stood loyal
right through – how will they react to their leader offering such reassuring
guarantees to turn-coats and Tories?

Some, as the 3 News/Reid Research poll indicates, will
decamp to the Greens in disgust. Others – a smaller but much more dangerous
number – will throw their support behind Mr Shearer’s rival, David Cunliffe (now
registering for the first time in the preferred prime-minister stakes). But
most, delighted by Labour’s steadily expanding claim upon the affections of the
electorate, will think only of the prospect of defeating their traditional
enemy, the National Party, and of laying low its infernally popular leader.

The option of going after National’s vote will also appeal to
Labour’s mostly middle-class membership because it involves so little genuine
political effort. No one will expect them to venture into the neighbourhoods of
the poor, where vicious dogs wait to leap at their throats and hostile Maori
and Pasifika voters ask embarrassing questions about jobs and housing and
health care for their kids and how long Labour’s MPs would last on shit wages and
inadequate welfare payments?

In their heart-of-hearts they know that to provide adequate
answers to such questions Labour would have to develop policies that would
instantly drive away all of those refugees from the Centre-Right. They know
from bitter historical experience that putting people first and money second
only earns Labour the unrelenting hostility of the mainstream media (not to
mention putting-off potentially generous business donors). It’s just so much easier
and less risky to rely on slick TV ads showing Mr Shearer playing his guitar to
delighted classrooms of healthy Pakeha children. So much less hassle to
distribute glossy, platitude-packed pamphlets in neighbourhoods where the
residents don’t bite. And so much more satisfying erecting billboards featuring
the rugged (but reliable) face of their “anti-political” leader, promising New
Zealand “A Future That Works”.

Spare some sympathy, then, for the newly-elected Policy
Council of the Labour Party: Jordan Carter, David Craig, Nigel Haworth, Leanne
Dalziel and Michael Wood. Theirs is the unenviable task of pulling together an
election platform that still has some kind of connection with the “democratic
socialist” principles to which the Labour Party still officially subscribes, but
to which the parliamentary caucus is still prepared to give its support. David
Craig, for example, has fought for years to extend the same level of state
support to mothers and children on the DPB as that extended to low-paid workers
by Working For Families. The same policy that Josie Pagani decried as
unhelpful to Labour’s candidates in 2011. Will that policy make it into Labour’s
2014 manifesto? Will any policies
likely to upset the party’s new, conservative, supporters?

The radical Marxist scholar, Slavoj Zizek, writing in the London Review of Books about the imminent
Greek elections, warns upholders of Europe’s political legacy that:

In his Notes Towards the
Definition of Culture, T.S.
Eliot remarked that there are moments when the only choice is between heresy
and non-belief – i.e., when the only way to keep a religion alive is to perform
a sectarian split. This is the position in Europe today. Only a new ‘heresy’ –
represented at this moment by Syriza – can save what is worth saving of the
European legacy: democracy, trust in people, egalitarian solidarity etc.

The sprawling political refugee camp that Labour is busily turning
itself into will find it increasingly difficult to distinguish between the “No Discussion
of Beliefs Permitted” rule it is currently enforcing in order not to upset its
National refugees, and a position which denies the importance of espousing coherent
political beliefs altogether. Such a Labour Party, by extirpating the “heresy” of genuine
social-democratic thought and allowing itself to become a safe haven for an
ideologically inert and politically demobilised population could, paradoxically,
win election after election.